Mr Morden wrote:I am surprised that anyone really believed that the so called Campaign books were written for 9th. That was a lie called out then and proved now.
Its sad in many ways:
* Marine players were given the majority of the page count for copy pasted and now proved useless min dexes.
* Everyone else got little or nothing because of this be it lore, models or stories.
* All those wasted pages could have been used for an interesting story rather than just bits of story wedged in between endless Marine reprints.
You seem very motivated to push an anti-
SM narrative for this series of books, despite reality not agreeing with your claims.
Given your reference to "copy pasted and now proved useless min dexes.", we can conclude you're talking about Loyalist
SM. They feature in exactly four of the nine books, with only three of them featuring this so-called "min dexes" - maybe four, if you judge the
BT content from F&F to be on the same level as the
BA/
DA/
SW content. Personally, I'd've put the
BT in the IF supplement, or maybe a
WD (like the Deathwatch ended up being), but that's just me. They do dominate the page count for the three books with the
BA/
DA/
SW content in, but it is worth noting that the
CSM use up a greater page count of Faith and Fury than the
SM &
BT content does, but ten pages or so. So we can see that they don't appear in five books, and therefore don't use up the majority of the page count in six of them.
You then go on to blame these
SM reprints in those three books as the reason why other factions didn't get much material across the whole nine book range, which doesn't make much sense for two reasons. Firstly, as noted, a large proportion of the content in those three "min dexes" is almost identical, merely with the
[CHAPTER] keyword
filed off and replaced with the appropriate Chapter name. Looking at the ToC for Ritual of the Damned, for example, that accounts for 14 of the 18 datasheets in the book, leaving two special characters and two Interrogator-Chaplains that actually need some work - and in three out of four cases, it's just applying Litanies to the Chaplain equivalents. Aside from (hopefully) testing Asmodai and the two Interrogator-Chaplains out, 17 out of 18 datasheets take minimal work to implement. Given that the datasheets make up a third of the pages the
DA get in the book, we're not seeing a lot of Studio effort here.
I count a further 7 or 8 pages which would be reprint material (Abilities, Updated Weapon and Datasheet Amendments, Datasheets (might only be a half page), Angels of Death, Obscuration Discipline, Vanguard Warlord Traits, Litanies of Battle and
maybe Special Issue Wargear) - and that's without knowing how many of the Stratagems are reprints (given I don't own the book to check). I don't see an obvious reference to a two-page spread of painted models, so I don't know if that's in there. Most of the points values page will be a reprint as well.
What does that leave as new content? Pages 30-33 (4 pages) look to be background, Master Lazarus' datasheet (shares a page reference with "Datasheets", above, so let's call it half a page), some degree of the Stratagem section may be new material (somewhere between 1 and 3 pages), the Death/Ravenwing Warlord Traits (1), Relics of Caliban (1), and the points and name generator (2 pages) - so, 8.5 pages, plus whatever is needed for non-reprint stratagems.
That shouldn't be that much development time for the Studio, even allowing for that much material three times for
BA/
DA/
SW. If you really think 10-11 pages three times is enough work to lead to everyone else getting, in your words, "little or nothing", then I've got a couple of bridges I'd like to sell you. I think you'll love the one with views of the Sydney Opera House, for example.
Could the page count have taken up by reprinted material - which I'll estimate at 20 pages per mini-dex, so 60 pages total - have been used to enhance the story? Maybe - but given they had six other books to play with where those 20 pages
weren't used of reprints, and no-one is claiming they did a stellar job in those, are they? I mean, did anyone praise the story of
Phoenix Rising or
Engine War when they dropped, let alone
Pariah? I certainly don't remember it, so I doubt those 60 extra pages would've been filled with quality, memorable story beats had that happened.
